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Transcript of Benjamin on Hachich
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O n H a s h i s h
Walter Benjamin
Translated by Howard Eiland and Others
with an introductory essay by marcus boon
the belknap press of harvard university press
Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England
2006
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Copyright 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Additional copyright notices and the Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication dataappear on pages 181183, which constitute an extension of the copyright page.
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Contents
Translators Foreword vii
Abbreviations and a Note on the Texts xiii
Walter Benjamin andDrugLiterature, byMarcusBoon 1
Editorial Note,byTillmanRexroth 13
Protocols ofDrugExperiments (112) 17
CompletedTexts
MysloviceBraunschweigMarseilles 105
Hashish in Marseilles 117
Addenda
From One-Way Street 129
From Surrealism 132
From MayJune 1931 135
From The Arcades Project 136
From the Notebooks 142
From the Letters 144
An Experiment by Walter Benjamin, by Jean Selz 147
Notes 159
Index 171
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Translators Foreword
t h e d r u g e x p er i m e nt s documented in this volume took place
in the years 1927 to 1934 in Berlin, Marseilles, and Ibiza. Along withWalter Benjamin, the participants included, at various times, the
philosopher Ernst Bloch, the writer Jean Selz, the physicians Ernst
Jol, Fritz Frnkel, and Egon Wissing, and Egons wife Gert
Wissing. Originally recruited as a test subject by Jol and Frnkel,
who were doing research on narcotics, Benjamin experimented with
several different drugs: he ate hashish, smoked opium, and allowed
himself to be injected subcutaneously with mescaline and the opiate
eucodal. Records of the experimentsthey were very loosely orga-
nizedwere kept in the form of drug protocols. Some of these ac-
counts were written down in the course of the experiments, while
others seem to have been compiled afterward on the basis of notes
and personal recollection. Benjamin also took hashish in solitude, as
witness the three accounts of an intoxicated evening in Marseilles.
He took these drugs, which he looked on as poison, for the sake of
the knowledge to be gained from their use. As he said to his friend
Gershom Scholem in a letter of January 30, 1928, The notes I made
[concerning the first two experiments with hashish] . . . may well
turn out to be a very worthwhile supplement to my philosophical ob-
servations, with which they are most intimately related, as are to a
vii
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certain extent even my experiences under the influence of the drug.
As an initiation into what he called profane illumination, the drug
experiments were part of his lifelong effort to broaden the concept of
experience.
During those last years of the Weimar Republic, Benjamin was
meditating a book on hashisha truly exceptional study, he tells
Scholemwhich, however, remained unrealized, and which he came
to consider one of his large-scale defeats. No doubt this book would
have differed from the loose collection of drug protocols and feuille-ton pieces published posthumously in 1972 under the title ber
Haschisch, and reprinted in 1985, slightly emended and expanded,
in Volume 6 of Benjamins Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writ-
ings), source of the present translation. Although we have nothing
to indicate specific plans in this regard, it is tempting to think of
the drug protocols as a detailed blueprint for the construction of
the projected volume; despite their fragmentary character, they artic-
ulate the gamut of motifs with which the book might well have
been concerned. They are in fact highly readable texts, those by
Benjamins colleaguesin which he is described and quotedno less
than his own, and their documentary notebook quality is not un-
related to the literary montage of some of Benjamins more im-
portant later works, such as The Arcades Project(into which he incor-
porated passages from the protocols) and Central Park. The
notational style, moreover, is a reflection of the discontinuous and as
it were pointillistic character of the drug experiences themselves,
which Benjamin likens to a toe dance of reason.
The philosophical immersion that intoxicants afforded Walter
Benjamin was not Symbolist derangement of the senses, then, but
viii
Translators Foreword
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transformation of reason. Which is to say: transformation of the tra-
ditional logic of noncontradiction and the traditional principle of
identity. Like the Surrealists, with whose works he was critically en-
gaged during the 1920s, Benjamin sought to infuse thinking with the
energies of dreambut in the interests of a wakingdream. In a state
of intoxication, the thread of ratiocination is loosened, unraveled, not
dissolved; with the emptying out of personality, there is a diffusion of
perspective. Thinking is sensualized. A mimetic power holds sway in
the realm of perception, the realm of image space, in all its plasticity.The intoxicated man takes the part of things around him, becoming,
like the physiognomic flneur or the child at play, a virtuoso of empa-
thy (another dangerous drug), and at the same time, with utter de-
tachment, drawing objects and events into his thickening web. The
drug weaves time and space together in a manifold resonant fabric,
an interpenetrating and superposed transparency of (historical) mo-
ments: what Benjamin, with a touch of the humor that is integral to
hashish, terms the colportage phenomenon of space. This involves
the disclosure of unexpected stations in a familiar milieu, of many
places in one place.
The feeling of loneliness is very quickly lost. My walking stick be-
gins to give me a special pleasure. The handle of a coffeepot used
here suddenly looks very large and moreover remains so. (One be-
comes so tender, fears that a shadow falling on the paper might
hurt it. . . . One reads the notices on the urinals.)
I immersed myself in intimate contemplation of the sidewalk be-
fore me, which, through a kind of unguent (a magic unguent)
ix
Translators Foreword
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which I spread over it, could have beenpreciselyas these very
stonesalso the sidewalk of Paris.
As she danced, I drank in every line she set in motion. . . . Many
identities passed over her back like fog over the night sky. When
she danced with Egon, she was a slender, black-caparisoned
youth; they both executed extravagant figures there in the room.
. . . The window at her back was black and empty; through its
frame the centuries entered by jolts, while with each of her move-
mentsso I told hershe took up a destiny or let it fall.
There is an analogy here to what the flneur experiences (and the
colportage phenomenon of space is said to be the flneurs basic ex-
perience) when he sees the ghost of a barricade on a modern Paris
streetthat is, when far-off times and places interpenetrate the ur-
ban landscape and the present moment, creating for him a kind of
historical palimpsest. And there is a further analogy to the way the
film camera reveals heretofore unknown corners of the common-
place, in a room, an object, or a face. In the metamorphic masquer-
ade-world of hashish, its moods recurrently intimating the nearness
of death, each particularity wears a face, or rather several faces, and
through the reigning ambiguity everything becomes a matter of nu-
ance, multivalence.
A defining feature of the drug experiences, which are always repre-
sented in terms of phases, is the fleeting character of the individual
moments. All sensations have a steeper gradient. One consequence
of this heightened velocity of thought is a certain inevitable resigna-
tion on the part of the test subject, an automatic displacement of at-
tention and a necessary obliquity. The subject can never say what has
x
Translators Foreword
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really moved him during the experiment. Yet, according to Benjamin,
there is a hashish effect only when one speaks about the hashish. In
the rush of intoxication, the attention of the subject is deflected from
the main object of his experience, which is inexpressible, to some in-
cidental object, which, though truncated, may prove more profound
than what he would have liked to say at first. In this way, the intoxi-
cated subject is carried along in the punctuated flow of perceptions,
one image suddenly merging into the next, as in a film, and the sense
of immense oceanic dimensions of time and space opening out iscountered by the constantly changing focus on the smallest and most
random contingencies. Hence, in his 1929 essay Surrealism, Ben-
jamin can speak of the dialectical nature of intoxication, of a disci-
plined, illuminated intoxication conducing to a deepened sobriety, at
once concentrated and expansive. In the dialectics of intoxication,
the threshold between waking and sleeping is worn away. (Every
image is a sleep in itself, reads one of the undated notes on hashish.)
At issue here, as everywhere in Benjamin, is a new way of seeing, a
new concreteness in relation to history and the everydayperception
more stratified and richer in spaces (Arcades Project, P1a,2). The
Surrealism essay goes on to ask about the conditions under which
such liberated experience can be the basis for political liberation.
A word about Benjamins central term in the drug writings. Rausch is
an important concept in the later philosophy of Nietzsche, where it
designates that Dionysian knowledge which was crucial for the
young Benjamin and his whole generation. The idea of the consum-
ing intoxication of creation, Rausch as a state of transport embody-
ing the highest intellectual clarity, plays a role in Benjamins dialogue
on aesthetics, The Rainbow, of 1915. The term is rendered in this
xi
Translators Foreword
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volume mainly as intoxication or trance, neither an entirely satis-
factory translation. The noun Rausch comes from the onomatopoeic
verb rauschen, to rustle; rush; roar; thunder; murmur. The English
word rush, cognate with rauschen, actually brings out a significant
aspect of the German concept (the relevance of velocity touched on
above), not to mention its usage in the argot of the 1960s drug cul-
ture, where it meant an intensification of intoxication. The French
term ivresse, with its literary associations in Symbolism (particularly
Baudelaire, whose Artificial Paradises was instrumental in Benjaminstaking up hashish), may have certain advantages here, though as a
translation it is perhaps too lyrical, just as intoxication is too clinical
and trance too mystical. In addition to its philosophical usage, con-
cerned with a complex existential state, the term Rausch is used in the
drug protocols to refer to the particular drug experience in question,
the drug trip. Benjamin makes fine distinctions in regard to the char-
acter of the drug high, often complaining of what seemed to him a
weak dose.
Thanks are due Maria Ascher for her incisive editing of the present
volume. In addition, the translator would like to acknowledge the
help received from consulting an earlier translation ofber Haschisch
by Scott J. Thompson, who performed an important service in first
presenting this eccentric and fascinating text to an English-language
audience.
xii
Translators Foreword
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Abbreviations and a Note on the Texts
The following abbreviations are used for works by Walter Benjamin:
GS Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols., suppl., ed. Rolf Tiedemann,
Hermann Schweppenhuser, et al. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,19721989)
GB Gesammelte Briefe, 6 vols., ed. Christoph Gdde and Henri
Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 19952000)
SW Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Michael W. Jennings et al.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19962003)
AP The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1999)
CWB The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, trans. Manfred R.
Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1994)
Translations in this book are by Howard Eiland, unless otherwise in-
dicated. Protocols by Benjamins colleagues are printed in italics.
xiii
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Walter Benjamin and Drug Literature
m a r cu s b o o n
Always the same worldyet one has patience.
Walter Benjamin,
On Hashish, Protocol 12
i f e v e r t h e re was someone who took drugs because of reading
books about them, then that person was Walter Benjamin. As early
as 1919, he noted propos of Baudelaires key text on hashish,
Artificial Paradises, which he had just finished reading, that it will
be necessary to repeat this attempt independently of this book.1 Inhis notes on his first experiment with hashish in 1927, he claimed a
feeling of understanding Poe much better now. Indeed, despite the
scientific trappings of the protocols in this book, Benjamins orien-
tation in examining hashish was similar to that found in his explora-
tion of the Parisian arcades, which were to form the basis for a new
kind of archeology/history of the nineteenth century. While Louis
Armstrong and his sidekick Mezz Mezzrow were making pot-smok-
1
1. Walter Benjamin, September 19, 1919, to Ernst Schoen, From the Letters, inthis volume.
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ing fashionable in New York City, and Commissioner of Narcotics
Harry Anslinger was beginning his congressional campaign against
the evils of smoking weed, Benjamin, ever the connoisseur of the re-
cently outmoded, lay in a hotel bed in Marseilles eating hashish in
the style of the great littrateurs of the nineteenth century.
The word hashish has at least two different meanings: histori-
cally, it has been a general term for psychotropic preparations made
from the cannabis plant (Alice B. Toklas hashish fudge was in fact
made with pulverized cannabis leaves); more commonly today, it re-fers to the resin, which is removed from the buds (flowers and sur-
rounding leaves) of the plant and pressed into beige, brown, or black
cakes.2 Knowledge of the psychotropic effects of cannabis probably
dates back to the Neolithic, while literary references to the drug
started with a variety of mystical and polemical poems published in
North Africa and the Middle East in medieval times, when debates
raged as to whether or not cannabis was prohibited to Muslims.3 Al-
though extracts of the cannabis plant may have been part of folk
remedies in Europe for centuries, hashish became well known in Eu-
rope only in the nineteenth century, as part of the orientalism that
was fashionable at the time. It was said that Napoleons armies had
brought hashish to Europe when they returned from the Egyptian
2
Marcus Boon
2. See Paul Bowles, Kif: Prologue and Compendium of Terms, in George An-drews and Simon Vinkenoog, eds., The Book of Grass (New York: Grove, 1967),108114.
3. On neolithic cannabis use, see Paul Devereux, The Long Trip: A Prehistory ofPsychedelia (New York: Penguin, 1997), 3944; and Richard Rudgley, EssentialSubstances: A Cultural History of Intoxicants in Society (New York: Kodansha,1994), 2831. On medieval Islamic cannabis use, see Franz Rosenthal, The Herb:Hashish versus Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1971); and Hakim Bey, The BhangNama, in Hakim Bey and Abel Zug, eds., Orgies of the Hemp Eaters (New
York: Autonomedia, 2004).
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campaigns of 17981801. In 1809 the great French orientalist Sylvestre
de Sacy presented a memorandum in Paris concerning the use of
hashish by the medieval Assassins, a radical Ismaeli group who lived
on what is now the Turkish-Iranian border.4 Although the etymol-
ogy that links hashish to assassin is probably false, this link stirred
the imaginations of Parisian bohemia, eventually leading to the for-
mation of the Club des Haschischins in Paris in 1845, a salon in an
old hotel on the Ile Saint-Louis at which a number of key Parisian
writers and artists, including Baudelaire, Balzac, Gautier, Delacroix,Daumier, and others, ate hashish in the form of a paste, mixed with
almonds, and washed down with a little soup and the sounds of a
string quartet. The club was immortalized in Gautiers charmingly
gothic short story Le Club des Hachischins (the spellings of the
word hashish and its cognates have been as diverse as the effects
claimed for the drug). The cascade of hallucinations found in this
story, and in other works such as the extravagant Hashish Eater(1857),
by the American writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, may seem improbable to
contemporary readers who have inhaled. It was not only the literary
conventions of the gothic that were responsible for this excess; the
doses of hashish ingested by nineteenth-century writers also appear
to have been potent enough for the drug to function more like a hal-
lucinogen than an after-dinner joint.
Baudelaire wrote two texts concerning hashish, each of which is
caustic, verging on hostile. In an 1851 essay, he compared hashish
unfavorably to the wine of the people, which he linked to revolu-
3
Walter Benjamin and Drug Literature
4. The text was published in 1818 as Mmoire sur la dynastie des Assassins etsur ltymologie de leur nom, Mmoires de lInstitut Royal de France, in Acadmiedes Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 4 (1818), 184.
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tionary consciousness.5 In 1860 he devoted half of his bookArtificial
Paradises to a discussion of hashishthe other half being devoted to
a loose translation of Thomas De Quinceys Confessions of an English
Opium Eater, generally considered the first literary discussion of drugs,
and for Baudelaire the last word on the subject. Although Baudelaire
pronounced hashish veritably satanic, it s hard to know how to take
this comment, coming from the author of the Litanies of Satan. If
Baudelaire linked hashish to evil, then this evil might be seen as a
passage out of the horrors and torpors of nineteenth-century bour-geois Europe. If this passage proved to be a dead end, and if
Baudelaire dutifully pointed out that fact, it did not stop generations
of French and other European youthDecadents, Symbolists, and
othersfrom discovering and rediscovering the drug, as a potential
catalyst for triggering Baudelairean visions.6 And Benjamin too, from
the variety of references found in The Arcades Project, clearly thought
that hashish provided a key to understanding Baudelaire, particularly
his early insight into the commodity form as a drug-like hallucination.
The situation surrounding drugs was changing rapidly during the
period in which Benjamin was writing. Around the time of World
War I, the first national and international conventions regulating
drug use were ratified, and the more or less free circulation of sub-
stances, which prevailed throughout the nineteenth century, was re-
placed by an increasingly complex system of regulation which has
continued to this day. At first, these regulations were aimed princi-
4
Marcus Boon
5. Du vin et du hachish, in Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes, vol. 1 (Paris:Gallimard, 1975), 397.6. Some of the key nineteenth-century texts on hashish have been collected inAndrew C. Kimmens, ed., Tales of Hashish: A Literary Look at the Hashish Expe-rience(New York: Morrow, 1977); and in Bey and Zug, Orgies of the Hemp Eaters.
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pally at opium-related substances (opium, morphine and heroin), but
in Germany Indian hemp was one of the substances whose use
was regulated by the drug law passed on December 10, 1929.7 Re-
ferring to his hashish experiment of April 18, 1931, Benjamin says that
Merck and Company may be depended upon (Protocol 9), so we
can assume that he had access to research-grade pharmaceuticals
the German drug company also being a producer of mescaline.
Legal or not, drug use was hardly seen as something worthy of cel-
ebration in Benjamins intellectual milieu. Despite Benjamins desire towrite a book about these substances,he was apparently concerned enough
about his reputation to urge his friend and correspondent Gerhard
Scholem to be discrete about his book plans.8The use of the word
crock to signify opium in Benjamins notes on the experiments he
conducted with Jean Selz on Ibiza in 1933 also suggests a concern
with discretion. At the same time, Benjamins level of concern cant
have been that great, since he did publish a first-person account of
his hashish experience in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1932. In fact,
Benjamins candor stands in marked contrast to that of fellow Ger-
man drug flneur Ernst Jnger, who prudently waited until 1970 to pub-
lish his own thoughts on a lifetime of drug experimentation, by which
point the climate for such publications was considerably altered.
After World War I, the situation surrounding drugs also changed
in literary terms. Although a number of the Surrealists used drugs,
contrary to popular belief Andr Breton was staunchly against drugs
and the exploration of consciousness using chemicalsand he ex-
pelled from the group any members who took drugs. Those writers
5
Walter Benjamin and Drug Literature
7. Werner Pieper, ed., Nazis on Speed: Drogen im Dritten Reich, vol. 2, 475(Lhrbach: Pieper and The Grne Kraft, n.d. [2002]).8. Letter to Gershom Scholem, July 26, 1932, From the Letters, in this volume.
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who were interested in drug use in the interwar periodAntonin
Artaud, Polish modernist Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Ren Daumal,
Benjaminwere an untimely group, their writings largely ignored or
unpublished until they were discovered by the Beats and the 1960s
radical movements. In a sense, Benjamins project for a left-wing pol-
itics of intoxication (a project which links him to figures such as
Bataille and the French College of Sociology writers) failed, and af-
ter World War II drugs became associated with libertarian or right-
wing writers: with Jnger, William Burroughs, R. Gordon Wasson,and Aldous Huxley, or with other untimely fellow travelers, such as
Henri Michaux. To this day, any rapprochement between Marxism
and intoxication, beyond the time-honored proletarian pleasures of
alcohol, is rare.9 Philosopher Ernst Bloch, who collaborated on
Benjamins second drug protocol, claimed that he experienced no ef-
fects when he took hashish.10
Since Ive linked Benjamin so firmly to literature, I should point
6
Marcus Boon
9. Scott J. Thompson argues that this aspect of Benjamins own work has beenneglected; see Thompson, From Rausch to Rebellion: Walter Benjamin on
Hashish, in Pieper, Nazis on Speed, vol. 2, 5969). For Marxist texts that discussintoxication, see Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), a study of yage healers in the Co-lombian Putumayo; Herbert Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, whose comments on1960s youth movements are cited in Thompson, From Rausch to Rebellion,6465; Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World(Bloomington: Indiana Univer-sity Press, 1984), which discusses carnival; and Georges Bataille, LIvresse destavernes et la religion, Critique, 25 (1948): 531539. Note also the dismissal ofpsychedelics in the proto-Situationist journal Potlatch: 19541957(Paris: EditionsAllia, 1996), 127128.10. See Ernst Bloch, Briefe, 19031975, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 310. Inhis magnum opus Das Prinzip Hoffnung, however, Bloch devotes several para-graphs to the power of hashish to produce a waking dream state. See The Prin-ciple of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cam-bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 8990.
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out that what he really intended to do with the notes he collected is
highly unclear; and if we apply the term literature to this jumble of
apparently scientific drug protocols, psychological fragments, philo-
sophical observations, essays, short stories, and other generic oddi-
ties, this is in part because literature is where we place that which
does not fit within the boundaries of traditional disciplines. The
words drugs and literature in their modern senses emerge around
the same time (circa 1800, with the Romantics). Both are concerned with
the full manifestation of the power of the human imagination, withconsciousness in its expanded sense, at a time of increasingly relent-
less utilitarianism. And both become conceptual garbage dumps where
the apparently dangerous excesses of the imagination are shunted for
disposalplaces filled with an allure that is all the more intense be-
cause of the sense of the forbidden, of transgression, with which they
are invested. What gets disposed of in these sites is not always treated
with great discrimination. Although hashish, opium, and mescaline
differ in their effects, this montage of texts and observations tends to
blur the boundaries between these drugsas do Benjamins readily
apparent personality, and his gorgeous writing style.
Benjamin was certainly not the first writer to plan a great philo-
sophical tome under the influence of drugsboth De Quincey and
Coleridge had plans which came to nothingbut On Hashish exists
only as a series of fragments. It is hard not to link this apprehen-
sion of a profound unity or workand the jumble of unfinished
fragments that is left in its wakewith intoxication itself, and with
the failure of drug-induced insights and experiences to sustain them-
selves in coherent form when the intoxication is over. Perhaps
Benjamin preferred it that way. The fact that it was the right-wing
German writer Ernst Jnger who, through sheer determination,
7
Walter Benjamin and Drug Literature
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Editorial Note
tillman rexroth
Tillman Rexroths Editorische Notiz appears at the end of his edition of
ber Haschisch (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 147149. It is this vol-
ume that Rexroth refers to below.
t h i s v o l um e c o n ta i n s Benjamins writings on drug intoxica-
tion, together with protocols (records) of drug experiments in which
Benjamin took part. Only two of the texts were published by
Benjamin himself. The short story MyslowitzBraunschweig
Marseille [MysloviceBraunschweigMarseilles] appeared in the
journal Uhu in November 1930; the personal account Haschisch in
Marseille [Hashish in Marseilles]which, although it repeats ver-
batim certain passages of the short story, is actually closer to the orig-
inal drug protocol that forms the basis of both textswas published
December 4, 1932, in the Frankfurter Zeitungand reprinted in 1961 in
the volume of selected writings entitled Illuminationen. These two
previously published pieces deserve a place in a volume that brings
together all available texts documenting Benjamins engagement with
intoxicating drugs. A French translation of Haschisch in Marseille,
which appeared in the Cahiers du Sud in January 1935 with the title
Hachich Marseille, was excluded, however, because this transla-
13
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tion was not prepared by Benjamin. None of the other texts in this
volume have been published before. The manuscripts and typescripts
of the records written by Benjamin and by the other authors are
housed in the Theodor W. Adorno Benjamin-Archiv in Frankfurt
am Main.
Although Benjamin planned to write a book about hashish, the
fragmentary Crocknotizen [Crock Notes] is the only one of the
transmitted texts in which theoretical reflection outweighs descrip-
tive notation. To be sure, the Crocknotizen cannot be regarded as ageneral rsum of Benjamins drug experiments; rather, they refer in
all likelihood to a particular experiment that took place at the home
of Jean Selz on Ibiza in 1932.1 It is this experiment, presumably, that
is being described in the following passage from a letter written by
Benjamin to Gretel Adorno:
At the start of the evening, I was feeling very sad. But I was con-
scious of that rare state in which the inner and the outer worries
balance each other very precisely, giving rise to what is perhaps the
only mood in which one really finds solace. We took this as practi-
cally a sign, and after making all the ingenious little arrangements
that free one from having to stir during the night, we set to work
around two oclock. It was not the first time in terms of chronol-
ogythough in terms of success, it was. The role of assistant,
which requires great care, was divided between us, in such a way
that each of us was at the same time server and beneficiary of the
service, and the conversation was interwoven with the acts of as-
14
Tillman Rexroth
1. The date was actually 1933. See Jean Selz, An Experiment by WalterBenjamin, included in this volume. [H.E.]
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sistance in the same way that the threads which color the sky in a
Gobelin tapestry are interwoven with the battle represented in the
foreground.
What this conversation was headed toward, what it sometimes
verged on, is something I can scarcely convey to you. But if the
notes which Ill soon draft on the subject of these hours attain the
requisite degree of precision, so as to be assembled with others in a
dossier which you know about, then the day may come when I will
have the pleasure of reading one or another of these things to you.Today Ive obtained significant results in my study of curtains
for a curtain separated us from the balcony that looked out on the
city and the sea.2
The protocols are arranged chronologically. Texts by Benjamin
thus appear alongside accounts written by Ernst Bloch, Ernst Jol,
and Fritz Frnkel. The authors of some of the protocols could not be
determined with certainty.
All of the drug records are reproduced in their entirety. Readers
should make allowance for overlapping of the texts, such as occurs
with the three versions of the hashish experiment in Marseilles, or
with Blochs protocol of the second hashish impression and
Benjamins supplementary transcript of this protocol. Readers should
likewise note that this volume omits a manuscript which is in the
possession of Gershom Scholem and which is the basis of the type-
15
Editorial Note
2. This letter, written from Ibiza on or around May 26, 1933, is printed in fulland annotated in GB4, 216220. Just prior to the passage quoted by Rexroth,Benjamin writes: Hardly any clouds [of opium smoke] rise to the ceiling, sodeeply do I understand how to draw them out of the long bamboo tube into myinsides (217). [H.E.]
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script printed here with the title Saturday, September 29, [1928];
Marseilles, and two handwritten notes which Benjamin incorpo-
rated into MyslowitzBraunschweigMarseille and into the pro-
tocol of May 11, 1928. Undated notes by Benjamin that do not belong
with any of the complete protocols have been printed to the extent
they can be deciphered.
The express wish of one of the participants in the experiments in-
duced the editor, in one case, to alter some proper names.3The pecu-
liarities of the protocolswhich for the most part comprise noteswritten in a state of intoxication or dictated for transcription by type-
writer and in part left uncorrectedhave been largely preserved.
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Tillman Rexroth
3. In question are the names of Gustav Glck and Erich Unger in Hashish inMarseilles. See Protocol 4, note 12. [H.E.]
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Protocols of Drug Experiments
1. December 18, 1927 19
2. January 15, 1928 23
3. May 11, 1928 36
4. September 29, 1928 47
5. March 1930 57
6. June 78, 1930 62
7. March 7, 1931 65
8. April 12, 1931 71
9. April 18, 1931 73
10. Crock Notes (ca. June 1933) 81
11. May 22, 1934 86
12. Undated Notes 98
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chapter 1
Main Features of My First Impression of Hashish
Written December 18, [1927], at 3:30 a.m.
1. Spirits hover (vignette style) over my right shoulder. Cold-
ness in that shoulder. In connection with this: I have the
feeling there are four others in the room besides me. (By-
passing the necessity of including myself in the count.)
2. Elucidation of the Potemkin anecdote with the explanation
or rather suggestion: show someone the mask (the mask of
ones own face, that is, the displayers face).1
3. Convoluted utterance on an ether mask, which (it goes with-
out saying) would also have mouth, nose, and so on.
4. The two coordinates in the apartment: cellarfloor / the
horizontal. Great horizontal extension of the apartment.
Suite of rooms, from which music is coming. But perhaps
also dread of the corridor.
5. Boundless goodwill. Falling away of neurotic-obsessive anxi-
ety complexes. The sphere of character opens up. All those
present take on hues of the comic. At the same time, one
steeps oneself in their aura.
6. The comic is elicited not just from faces but from incidents.
One seeks occasions for laughter. And perhaps it is only for
19
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this reason that so much of what one sees presents itself as
arranged, as experimentso that one can laugh about it.
7. Poetic evidence in the phonetic: at one point I maintain that,
in answering a question a little earlier, I had used the expres-
sion for a long time purely as a result (so to speak) of my
perception of a long time in the sounding of the words of the
question and answer. I experience this as poetic evidence.
8. Connection; distinction. In smiling, one feels oneself grow-
ing small wings. Smiling and fluttering are related. You feeldistinguished because, among other things, it seems to you
that fundamentally you enter into nothing too deeply: that,
no matter how deeply you penetrate, you are always moving
on the threshold. A sort of toe dance of reason.
9. One is very much struck by how long ones sentences are.
This, too, connected with horizontal extension and (proba-
bly) with laughter. The arcade is also a phenomenon of long
horizontal extension, perhaps combined with vistas receding
into distant, fleeting, tiny perspectives. The element of the
diminutive would serve to link the idea of the arcade to
laughter. (Compare the Trauerspiel book: miniaturizing
power of reflection.)2
10. There arises, quite fleetingly, in a moment of introversion,
something like an inclination [words illegible] to stylize one-
self, to stylize ones body.
11. Aversion to information. Rudiments of a state of rapture.
Great sensitivity to open doors, loud talk, music.
12. Feeling of understanding Poe much better now. The gates to
a world of grotesquerie seem to be opening. Only, I dont
wish to enter.
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Protocols of Drug Experiments